Report 631
Report #631 Skillset: Starhymn Skill: New Org: Cantors Status: Completed Jun 2011 Furies' Decision: We will make have JustChorale? give masked afflictions. As a side note, we suggest future Starhymn reports focus on tweaking the new Angel skills to make them more useful rather than suggesting we add even more skills. Problem: Starhymn is lacking in imbuable powers compared to the other bard guilds. The special report gave us three new abilities, but given their costs and short durations they can't be used frequently enough to make up for our song itself lacking in effectiveness. 0 R: 0 Solution #1: Create a new mid stanza imbuable power that passively afflicts with one unmasked freeze level. 0 R: 0 Solution #2: Create a new high stanza imbuable power that passively strips defenses from a list similar to AlterAura in Psionics (waterbreathing, waterwalking, quicksilver, fire, frost, kafe, insomnia, levitation, constitution, galvanism, sixthsense). The defense stripped is masked to the bard and the person hit. 0 R: 0 Solution #3: Both solution 1 and 2, or some other new ability or abilities. Player Comments: ---on 6/14 @ 06:39 writes: From the Starhymn special report: Starhymn has less Mid and High stanza abilities than the three other bard guilds, and you literally find yourself imbuing bad abilities because there's -literally- nothing else you can imbue. Specifically, here are the statistics: all four bard guilds have 5 low stanza abilities, Cantors and Harbingers have 4 mid stanza while the other two have 5, and Cantors have 5 high stanza effects while all three others have 6, (including the instakill and the other active ability). This means Cantors only have 3 passives to imbue in their high stanzas while the other three have 4 and have some choice in their more powerful abilities - for instance, to unimbue the terrain-specific one when they're not in that type of terrain. In addition, unless you're on raid defense, AngelSong and its equivalents are abilities with literally no effect, meaning Cantors only have 3 usable mid stanza effects, while again, Cacophony and Spiritsingers have 4. CelestOde is also near useless in 1v1 combat, as Cantors generally don't kill through damage (and in the case that they do, it doesn't effect manabarbs/egovice damage), meaning quite often there are literally only two mid stanza abilities that will have any effect whatsoever. ---on 6/14 @ 14:00 writes: While I think Starhymn could indeed use an addition to its skillset you help it along the way, I think you're looking in the wrong direction. A single freeze every ten seconds isn't going to help your cause, since you don't have any real solid way to stick it, and I think passive defense stripping is a little too much. I would perhaps suggest for now until something more solid is thought up, tweaking what you have, such as JustChorale, which would gain a huge benefit if the strike message was turned into a generic one, rather than cycling through the different Supernals giving you a masked affliction strike. Could even make it so the Cantor themselves still see the different Supernals, but the target would see something like, "The light of Holy Celestia burns into you as the blessed Supernals judge you unworthy." Anyways, something to think about. ---on 6/15 @ 00:56 writes: Tried that with the special report, but that change wasn't made for whatever reason, and at any rate, we'd like to have imbuable abilities on par with the rest of the music specs - at least one if not two. ---on 6/15 @ 11:53 writes: Ah, ok. And I completely understand wanting the imbuable power, but I don't think a single freeze is going to help your situation and would really only be a waste of this report unless you can prove otherwise. ---on 6/16 @ 00:37 writes: I see its main use being when we have multiple Cantors and/or Aquamancers in a group combat situation. We already have decent afflictions for smaller situations and both these ideas are aimed towards synergy and offering support in a group fight. That said, it doesn't have to be exactly the skills I've suggested here; any new ability or abilities that work towards that would be completely welcome. ---on 6/21 @ 01:39 writes: I still feel that changing JustChorale to have a generic affliction message would be a better way to go. It wasn't specifically rejected in the special report, so it's worthwhile to give that a shot since a singular unmasked affliction really doesn't do too much right now. Alternatively, it could give two afflictions if it must stay unmasked. ---on 6/24 @ 20:30 writes: I'm with Asmodea in that I don't see a single hit of freeze doing anything useful, but if you think it would help I don't see any real objection to this report. ---on 6/27 @ 18:46 writes: Alternatively, cantors could get a passive-damage song that boosts in damage when the target is aflame and chill levels increase to be considered in combination with solution 1. A kind of a fire and ice theme that is so common in "visions" of hell (I'm looking at you, Robert Frost).